Pycon NL: programming, past and future - Steven Pemberton¶

Tags: python, pycon

(One of my summaries of the Pycon NL one-day conference in Utrecht, NL).

(Note: I’ve heard a keynote by Steven at pygrunn 2016.)

Steven is in the python documentary, he co-designed the abc programming language that was the predecessor to python. ABC was a research project that was designed for the programmer’s needs. He also was the first user of the open internet in Europe in November 1988, as the CWI at the university had the first 64kbps connection in Europe. Co-designer of html, css, xhtml, rdf, etc.

1988, that’s 37 years ago. But only about 30 years earlier, the first municipality (Norwich, UK) got a computer. 21 huge crates. It ran continuously for 10 years. A modern Raspberry pi would take 5 minutes to do the same work!

Those early computers were expensive: an hour of programming time was a year’s salary for a programmer. So, early programming languages were designed to optimize for the computer. Nowadays, it is the other way around: computers are almost free and programmers are expensive. This hasn’t really had an effect on the way we program.

He’s been working on declarative programming languages. One of the declarative systems is xforms, an xml-based declarative system for defining applications. It is a w3c standard, but you rarely see it mentioned. But quite some companies and government organisations use it, like the Dutch weather service (KNMI).

The NHS (UK nationwide health service) had a “Lorenzo” system for UK patient records that cost billions of pounds, took 10 years to build and basically failed. Several hospitals (and now hospitals in Ukraine!) use an xforms-system written in three years by a single programmer. Runs, if needed, on a Raspberry pi.

He thinks declarative programming allows programmers to be at least ten times more productive. He thinks, eventually everyone will program declaratively: fewer errors, more time, more productivity. (And there’s a small conference in Amsterdam in November).

Unrelated photo from our 2025 holiday in Austria: in Vienna/Wien I visited the military museum. This is the car in which archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo in 1914.